I am not a fan of David Cameron's European policy. If the EU question derails his premiership, as it did those of John Major, Margaret Thatcher and – along with the once mighty miners – Ted Heath, it will serve him right. Instead of confronting and facing down his unappeasable Eurosceptic ultras, he has pandered to them. Indeed he fatally did so with a silly promise that helped him win the Tory leadership in 2005.

That said, the prime minister and the hooligan right (the Sun is on board) are correct to oppose this week's likely confirmation of Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European commission at an EU summit to be held in the Belgian city of Ypres – potent symbol of the European civil war, which began a century ago this August and started the continent's collapse into the relative impotence we can all observe today.

Mistrusted in Britain – nice but dim IDS has sounded off again – Juncker is the candidate of the European People's Party (EPP), the main conservative bloc which won the most seats in May's European elections, despite the widespread Eurosceptic surge. The centre-left bloc in Strasbourg is backing him too to assert the power of the elected parliament over the bureaucracy in Brussels. But Juncker is not even the right choice for Europe: he symbolises everything that is backward-looking and out-of-date.

Cameron may not have been wise to make such a fuss – he's lobbying again, too – about the appointment of a Luxembourg (population 539,000) wheeler-dealer to a job that carries far less clout than it did during the (brief) heyday of Jacques Delors, when the federalism the Tory right feared – fears – was potent. It is not federalism that the eurozone countries now face, but German hegemony, albeit a more benign kind than envisaged by the Kaiser's Berlin in 1914.

Not even that matters as much as it did. In a BBC corridor recently I chatted with Lord Carrington, former foreign secretary, Nato secretary general, holder of a wartime military cross, now 94 and still in great shape. He said he had recently reminded his old pal Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, that he had sacrificed six years of his youth to preventing German domination of Europe – "and look at it now".

What had been Schmidt's reply? A mournful "not for long", by which he apparently meant that German population projections were so baleful that its future was uncertain. On some calculations Britain will overtake Germany (Turkey certainly will), an extraordinary claim that would have profound implications. German unification has not been a great success in the ex-communist east in the two decades that saw the parallel rise of China.

Back to Juncker. Last week Ian Traynor wrote a vivid profile of Luxembourg's 19-year-serving ex-PM. (He was also finance minister much of the time.) I expect the Juncker camp saw it as fair and helpful, unlike most of the coverage in the parochial and spiteful British press. It made some decent points in his favour. And, after all, aren't all EU commission presidents federalists in the way that all popes must be Catholics? Indeed.

But Traynor also highlighted Juncker's role as the fixer and gofer between France and Germany who helped iron out the tensions that made possible the creation of the euro. A great success, wasn't it? The fudge included letting weak and peripheral small EU states – Greece and Portugal come to mind – enter a monetary union for which they were (at best) not ready.

The disciplinary ton of bricks since dumped on their heads condemns them to a deflationary and depressed future. Yet the countries that first broke the Juncker-brokered rules on excess budget deficits (3% was the agreed maximum at Maastricht in 1991) were, yes, France and Germany – too big for Brussels to bully. As I recall, the bureaucracy chose to make an example of Ireland.

All this might be fixable in time, though the eurozone is not out of the woods despite all the mutual self-congratulation that it has weathered the worst. Its many shaky banks with their piles of shaky loans persistently fail half-hearted stress tests imposed upon them, less robust than the Anglo-Saxon stress tests. A crisis in the Chinese shadow banking system – also awash with dodgy loans since 2008 – may trigger a fresh crisis.

So the US and UK may have been the worst offenders in the banking boom and bust, but they have taken stronger steps to emerge from the recession. Hampered by rival national priorities – notably German caution – the European Central Bank, led by clever Mario Draghi, is still only talking about quantitative easing to unclog the system.

Europe is living in dangerous times, its growth rate poor, its monetary system on the edge of Japanese-style deflation, its unemployment rates and labour market rigidities scary, its resurgent nationalist politics – the rise of Le Pen, Farage, Golden Dawn and other populists, on the left too – increasingly destabilising. The EU came into being to prevent the twin disasters of 1914 and 1939 happening again. It's not looking great, is it?

What the EU needs at this juncture is strong and inspiring leadership from men and women who inspire confidence. Yeah, right. France is enfeebled. Italy is still Italy, glorious food. Britain, whose PM won his party's leadership by promising to quit the EPP (he did, too), has sidelined itself to a startling degree. No wonder he keeps getting his judgments wrong; he's out of the loop. Juncker is only the latest miscalculation.

That leaves Berlin, whose cautious chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a Juncker-sceptic but found herself unable to rescue Cameron from his own folly thanks to a domestic sandbagging by her tabloids and coalition partners. Juncker has become a symbol for them, too, a symbol of anti-nationalist probity, of the right of a "democratic" parliament at Strasbourg to claim co-leadership with Brussels.

Ah yes, Brussels. Hard to imagine now how Margaret Thatcher feared the "Belgian Empire", isn't it? National governments, especially in Berlin and (Germany's constitutional court) Karlsruhe, were never going to let it set the pace. One dynamic Jacques Delors every century or so is enough. That's why the big countries prefer Belgians, Luxembourgers or Portugal's Jose Manuel Barroso to be president of the commission or – the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy – president of the council itself.

Tony Blair for a top job? Or a more forceful national politician from a member state? That sounds risky. Let's make Cathy Ashton our British foreign minister instead. She won't rock the EU's leaky boat. Let's make Juncker, a chain-smoking EU obsessive who's been around for 20 years, the new commission president. If he has a redeeming vice, it is, so diplomats tell the FT, that he drinks more than is wise.

Yes, yes, but the downside of respectably dull bureaucrats and safe centrist politicians and tipplers from small countries regularly invaded by the neighbours is that it's a luxury that is becoming expensive at a time when the world is changing faster than Europe is adapting to it.

China? India? A retreating US, scornful of its EU Nato partners' dwindling defence budgets (even loyal Britain) at a time when Vladimir Putin's finger is twitching on Europe's gas supplies? World Cup and Olympic Brazil on the rise too? Yes. Europe is visibly shrinking and Juncker is a symbol of that shrunken, quiet-life parochialism, the head-in-the-sand candidate, presented as the pan-European democratic choice when Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage or Beppe Grillo each has a more potent national claim.

In Ypres most of the 28 EU leaders will unenthusiastically go along with Mr Head in Sand as their quiet-life option. Several, including France, want to please Merkel because they want to water down Berlin's demands for tighter fiscal controls on their budgets. It will make Cameron's renegotiation-and-referendum strategy for Britain's continued UK membership – another bit of Downing St tactics-first folly – that much harder in 2017.

A UK "Brexit" would be even more foolish and self-defeating than a Juncker presidency. For all the silliness that sometimes comes from Brussels, Strasbourg and the Luxembourg court, Britain and Europe still need each other. The cost of a Brexit would be much bigger than the populist glibly assert. But a vote for Juncker in Ypres is a vote for just that, a vote for Farage, Mr Head in Pub.